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The F-Script project has announced the availability of F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection.

The web browser has been the dominant thin client, now rich client, for almost two decades, but can it compete with a new thin client that makes better technical choices and avoids the glacial standards process? I don't think so, as the current web technology stack of HTML/Javascript/Flash has accumulated so many bad decisions over the years that it's ripe for a clean sheet redesign to wipe it out.

Windows 7 RTM Build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds: "The bug in question - a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility - appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (i.e. not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a 'showstopper' in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory," reports InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. Microsoft is claiming the bug is a chipset driver issue, but Kennedy's testing of the latest Intel INF Update Utility driver set and VMware virtualized chipset drivers suggests otherwise. "This is clearly a Microsoft bug - and the fact that it manifests itself via the chkdsk.exe utility makes me wonder if it isn't something intrinsic to the Windows 7 version of the New Technology File System (NTFS) driver stack." Worse still, user comments suggest that Windows Server 2008 R2 suffers from the same flaw.

A new version of the HelenOS operating system was released last night. It comes with improved support of several hardware platforms, file system and block device drivers enhancements, and user interface changes such as console inheritance or multibyte character support. Check the 0.4.1 release notes for more details or download it here.

"Windows Vista has been dragged through the IT industry mud for most of its life, in some cases for good reason. But Microsoft's OEM chief believes that Windows 7's success will help repair the damage to Vista's reputation and polish its legacy. Windows 7 and Windows Vista share much of the same code, and over time, this could cause Windows Vista bashers to soften their views, said Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of the OEM division at Microsoft. 'I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there,' Guggenheimer said in a recent interview. 'So it'll actually be interesting to see in two years what the perception is of Vista.'"

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Determined to simply dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple -- the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'

In a recent interview, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Moller talks about the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. "Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback. The linked article also indicates that there are other video sites (apart from Wikimedia and Dailymotion) that are moving to the open standards format for video, noting that "hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format".

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

Finjan managed to research a trading network and botnet, where compromised PCs are bought and sold for profit. Their report shows "the operations of the Golden Cash network consisting of an entire trading platform of malware-infested PCs. The trading platform utilizes all necessary components (buyer side, seller side, attack toolkit, and distribution via 'partners'). This advanced trading platform marks a new milestone in the cybercrime evolution. By turning compromised PCs from a one-time source of profit into a digital asset that can be bought and sold again and again, cybercriminals are maximizing their illegal gains."

While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to "eat these vendors' lunches", offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. "It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been," says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins "really depends on what developers do", says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer.

InfoWorld's Bill Snyder questions whether AT&T's jockeying on tethering and MMS may signal iPhone pricing surcharges to come. After all, as Apple's exclusive U.S. partner, Ma Bell should have plenty of insight into upcoming iPhone features and revenue opportunities. Yet AT&T was very conspicuous in its absence from the list of providers who will support tethering and MMS at Tuesday's launch of the new iPhone at WWDC, and by Wednesday, it was backpedaling furiously, saying it will offer both services -- later in the year. Certainly, the exclusive arrangement between the companies is proving to be an ugly roadblock to Apple's iPhone vision. But Snyder thinks it may go deeper than that: "My best guess is that we'll see horrendous pricing surcharges for tethering and MMS, on top of the already expensive data and voice charges iPhone users pay. I don't think AT&T execs wanted to stand up at WWDC and announce that."

Fedora 11 comes with many improvements in package management including a update version of RPM and Yum that reduces memory consumption and performs faster. Fedora 11 also includes the presto plugin for Yum that downloads the binary deltas for updates and typically saves over 80% of the download size. Linux Mag takes a look with some interesting benchmarks that show modest improvements overall.

"Despite its public diffidence about enterprise adoption, Apple has made Snow Leopard an easier fit for the enterprise. ActiveSync support, the death of AppleTalk, and various security enhancements are of little use to the consumer audience that Apple formally targets," InfoWorld reports.

The world's third-largest PC vendor plans to roll out Moblin Linux across a range of machines, including its Aspire One nettops, as well as regular laptop and desktop PCs, the company announced at Computex in Taipei. A number of netbooks running several different versions of Moblin were also on display at Computex, including Suse Moblin, Xandros Moblin, Linpus Moblin, Red Flag Moblin and Ubuntu Moblin running on netbooks from Hewlett-Packard, Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International, and Hasee Computer.